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Tag Archives: Call of Cthulhu

The Alderman house looms large. At night the moans of Alderman’s son and wife can be heard drifting from the windows. He allows almost no-one in. Soon he will die, take over his son’s body and seek a new wife to continue the cycle, or the reincarnation of his lost Toringi love.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that systems do matter when it comes to games. This is less true in computer games, where the machine hides the mechanisms from the players for the most part, and can handle special rules, exceptions and complex calculations without slowing down. In roleplaying games, however, system very much does matter and the best games have system and setting that works in tandem.

Call of Cthulhu’s sanity system, as well as its relatively gritty and deadly core system, work in tandem very well to produce an outcome where players are extremely careful and even may keep themselves deliberately ignorant to avoid madness. It doesn’t always work and a tommy-gun still solves a lot of problems that it, perhaps, shouldn’t, but when it does work – it’s perfect.

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Weed doesn’t usually kill, but a new strain Cannabis Sativa Nahum is different. Not enough time has passed for studies, but people are disappearing throughout the hood. The source is a rooftop greenhouse, full of giant, glowing plants, grey ash, skeletons and a meteorite.

It’s hard to pick just one and it’s also hard to decide upon what criteria I should judge which is my favourite. Some systems are a joy, some a chore. Some backgrounds, likewise. It can be fun to create something new and it can be fun to work on something with a lot of reach. It can be great to turn a property from its form as a book, film or comic into a game. Each game has its own microcosm of different factors and can be a favourite in a different way.

I’ve worked on Dungeons and Dragons and that’s quite a feather in your cap (at least when you’ve worked directly for Wizards) but the various incarnations of D&D, even 5th Edition, just really aren’t my cup of tea and while I enjoy Dark Sun and Planescape, the more vanilla fantasy settings and ideals typical of D&D are frustratingly hackneyed and cliche (not that that’s bad, it’s just hard and not that enjoyable to write for).

Breathing new life into BLOOD! was fun, an old, relatively obscure horror game that we always loved, but it wasn’t really ‘mine’.

Agents of SWING was a passion project, and I enjoy writing for FATE (though less so the current edition). Working together all the threads of the action/adventure series of the 60s and 70s was a fun challenge.

Working on SLA Industries was great and I and Dave Allsop had good synergy and mutual understanding in the work I did for SLA. Unfortunately that joy has been lessened by falling out with one of the other people involved and the semi-butchering of the main book I did for them. A similar thing – editorial interference I didn’t like – happened in work I did for Call of Cthulhu.

Creating the semi-official Neverwhere RPG, adding to the lore and ideas, creating an innovative system and then giving the whole shebang away for free (terms of the agreement) was a huge amount of fun and that game – in its third edition – may be my most favourite, if least profitable, thing I’ve ever done.